If you’re a local or visiting Brisbane, whether you have a spare 30 minutes to drop in for a dose of art at either of our neighbouring buildings — the Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art — or a leisurely 3 hours to wander both sites, here are some suggestions to make the most of your visit.
Pick and choose your preferences from the range of contemporary and historical Australian, Asian, Pacific and international art on display.There’s something for everyone, whether you’re aged 3 or 103.
Queensland Art Gallery
The Queensland Art Gallery building opened in 1982 as part of the first stage of the Queensland Cultural Centre at South Bank; until then, the Gallery never had a purpose-built permanent home. Designed around the Brisbane River, the spectacular Watermall’s cavernous interior runs parallel to the waterway threading its way through the ‘River City’.
Collection highlights: Australian art
The work of Australian artists have been collected by the Queensland Art Gallery since its foundation in 1895, however few works in our Collection have enjoyed as much popularity as Under the jacaranda 1903 by R Godfrey Rivers (illustrated). Considered a quintessential image of Brisbane, the clouds of purple blooms capture the attention of Gallery visitors and has ensured the painting’s enduring appeal. Hanging alongside is Monday morning 1912 by Vida Lahey (illustrated), another of the Gallery’s most loved works. The painting of two young women doing the family wash, once a common sight in Australian households, now a recording of a by-gone era.
Interesting facts: Under the jacaranda depicts the first jacaranda tree grown in Australia, planted in Brisbane’s Botanic Gardens in 1864; while the laundry room depicted in Monday morning was located in the artist’s home, at the time piped water and built-in concrete troughs were considered modern conveniences!
Location: Australian Art Collection, Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Galleries (10-13)
R Godfrey Rivers Under the jacaranda 1903
Vida Lahey Monday morning 1912
Collection highlight: Contemporary Australian art
The jewellery-like intimacy of Fiona Hall’s Australian set (from ‘Paradisus Terrestris Entitled’ series) 1998–99 (illustrated) is a juxtaposition between culture and nature; human body parts combine with native botanical species, while Rosalie Gascoigne is best known for her wall-based assemblages, Lamp lit 1989 (illustrated) created from discarded road signs.
Interesting facts: Fiona Hall has transformed humble disposal sardine-tins by engraving, chasing and burnishing in the tradition of the colonial silversmith. ‘Lamp lit’ might suggest car headlights catching the road signs from which the work is made, but it also refers to the artist’s emotional response to a mass of brilliant yellow lantern-shaped flowers she encountered on the road to Bungendore in New South Wales, which inspired the work.
Location: Australian Art Collection, Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Galleries (10-13)
Fiona Hall Australian set 1998–99
Rosalie Gascoigne Lamp lit 1989
Collection highlights: Indigenous Australian art
Artistic expressions from the world's oldest continuing culture are drawn from all regions of the country in the Gallery's holdings of Indigenous Australian artworks.
Kaapa Mbitjana Tjampitjinpa was a well-known artist and respected Elder of Anmatyerre/Arrernte heritage. Goanna Story c.1973-74 (illustrated) is from one of the traditional dreaming stories, and this work shows four of the reptiles moving towards a waterhole. Walangkura Napanangka's Untitled (Tjintjintjin) 2006 (illustrated) depicts the rockhole and cave site of Tjintjintjin, to the west of Walungurra (Kintore) in Western Australia.
Interesting facts: Goanna Story has a strong sense of symmetry; one half is a mirror image of the other, while Tjintjintjin's symbols map out the area's geographical features, through which ancestor figure Kutungka Napanangka passed on her travels across the Gibson Desert during the creation time.
Location: Australian Art Collection, Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Galleries (10-13)
Kaapa Mbitjana Tjampitjinpa Goanna Story c.1973–74
Walangkura Napanangka Untitled (Tjintjintjin) 2006
Collection highlights: International art
Surrounded by works from Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (illustrated) and Edgar Degas (illustrated), La Belle Hollandaise (The beautiful Dutch girl) 1905 (illustrated) is a key painting that marks a transition from the subdued hues and emaciated figures of Pablo Picasso’s ‘blue period’ to the serenity and warmth of the ‘rose period’. Picasso must have been pleased with the result — he inscribed the work at the top left as a gift to Paco Durio, his dear friend and neighbour in the Parisian suburb of Montmartre.
Interesting fact: Pablo Picasso's La belle Hollandaise was donated to the Gallery in 1959; at the time this major work by one of the greatest living twentieth century masters; set a world record price at £55,000.
Location: International Art Collection, Philip Bacon Galleries (7-9)
Pablo Picasso La Belle Hollandaise 1905
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec Tete de fille (Head of a girl) 1892
Edgar Degas Three dancers at a dance class c.1888-90
Roy and Matilda
For those visiting with children of all ages, drop by the home of Roy and Matilda, two mice who one day decided to visit the Queensland Art Gallery, loved it so much, they decided to say. Just look for the letters 'R' and 'M' carved into their beautiful wooden front door.
Interesting fact: One day, a man who worked in the Galley’s workshop restoring and carving frames found they were living here and decided to make them a special little front door.
Location: Australian Art Collection, Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Galleries (10-13)
Watermall & Sculpture Courtyard
The Queensland Art Gallery’s grand Watermall — a visitor favourite for both regular art lovers and tourists — extends far beyond the Gallery’s interior; past the Dandelion fountains (illustrated) through to the reflection pond and Sculpture Courtyard. Why not relax and enjoy a quiet moment of contemplation at the adjoining QAG Cafe.
Interesting facts: The Queensland Art Gallery was designed in harmony with the Brisbane River, receiving the prestigious Sir Zelman Cowen Award for Public Architecture the year it opened, now protected after Queensland Heritage status.
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James Turrell’s Architectural Light series represents the artist’s smallest works in number, but the largest in terms of sheer physical size, and they adorn public and private buildings and structures around the world, including, of course, the Gallery of Modern Art’s (GOMA) Night Life 2018.
In this interview, I spoke with James Turrell from the artist’s home near Flagstaff, Arizona, about the idea of taking light out of a room and into the night.
Chris Saines (CS) / James, I wanted to take you back to the concept statement that you provided to me in 2016 — in response to the brief for the work, which, of course, we now know as Night Life. You recalled this formative experience that you’d had as a young boy, about six. You were sitting alongside your father as he piloted his small plane in to land in Los Angeles, just as the sun set over the city. Why has that particular moment remained such a vivid and important one right up to the present day?
James Turrell (JT) / Well, the big thing was that the sun had actually gone down before we were landing, and we were just watching the lights of the city come out. It’s always beautiful, and it makes us seem like we’re almost a bioluminescent lichen on the surface of the earth. And, just as we were watching the lights beginning to come out, which was very beautiful, he said: ‘a peasant by day, a princess by night’. I’ll never forget that. We do this ourselves — we dress up, change our clothes from our work clothes, or however we were during the day, and then go out at night. It’s this other time when we have this other raiment that we put on. And buildings do this and structures do this and cities do this.
CS / It’s true to say that the public immediately engaged with Night Life, so it prompts me to ask, who is the audience for the works in this series, and who do you have in mind when you conceive of them?
JT / Well, this is a strange thing, because I know that Carl Andre said that his art was for everyone, but many people didn’t understand that or see any art in his work whatsoever. And I come from a Quaker family that does not believe in art — they think art is a vanity. The fact is, I like art where you don’t have to read about it to know how to look at it. And so I do want [to make] something that people respond to, you know, and it’s terrible to say, but it’s not that different than when I was a child in a crib, fascinated by the light above me. It’s this quality that you don’t need a program to tell the players [how to play] — you know that it’s you and how you are looking, and that it’s made for you and how you see. This idea of almost a conversation between buildings, this idea of raiment at night and a building taking on a new personality. The fact is, the work is rather astonishingly simple and I don’t want to need it to require an intellectual support system. I guess that would be the best way to say it. On the other hand, I think that if you get into anything intellectually, it can be quite deep and profound, and [my work has] a lot to do with how we think about our built environment, how we think about structures at night and how we think about the use of energy, all these things. So there is a lot to say about all these things. Of course, now that we’re involved with LED light, things are changing. Rather than putting light outside and aiming it up at a building that then spills up into the night sky and decreases our ability to see the stars at night, I do enjoy having the light within a building . . .
CS / That leads very well into my next question. When planning a new work in this series, what are the first principles that come into play as you form your initial response to a commission brief?
JT / First of all, it’s a look at the building, its location and the age or time of the building, where it sits in the history of the art of architecture, and to have a way of understanding what the building is expressing — its connection with the built environment around it [is very important]. It was very helpful to get images that were taken all around GOMA, looking [at the building] every which way. Some photos seemed like they have little to do with anything I would be doing, but they helped me to know about the area and its history.
CS / So it’s about where a building is in the world, how it relates to the city around it and the history of that place. It’s all incredibly important. How precisely have you applied those first principles to developing the work here in Brisbane?
JT / Sometimes you know more about how to make up your own history as you see more of it. Some of these things are unintended, but then as this history goes forward, you [end up] not just seeing yourself, but seeing yourself in relationship to all these other factors, not just people. If you’re involved in art, you’re going to be a globalist. You are thinking about people all over the world, and you think about the different places where things go and the different characters of landscape, atmosphere, and people and culture.
CS / The architects who were responsible for GOMA had a great vision in that they imagined a light or a projection work contained in a cavity behind the building’s north-east and south-east facades, the two big glass...
